


Against the Dying of the Light

by orphan_account



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Apocalypse, Existential Crises, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Survival, also solitude, but not dan or phil, dan thinks about religion a lot, disaster au, epidemic, im not cruel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-04
Updated: 2017-08-04
Packaged: 2018-12-11 02:05:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11704557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Dan starts believing in God. He didn’t mean to, really. It’s not like he woke up one morning and suddenly went, “You know what? God is real. I’ve had a revelation, I totally believe all of it!” and went from there. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been religious before, either. It just sort of happened.He came to an ultimatum. If God and Heaven and Hell weren’t real, there was essentially no point. There was nothing for him to keep going for, nothing for him to hold on to. Why?The world was fucked. Completely, utterly, fucked. And Dan Howell along with it.





	Against the Dying of the Light

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting on my computer for literally three years, since an old internet friend of mine convinced me that it would be fun to write an apocalypse au. It's by no means a finished piece, but hey its kind of cool and I enjoyed the process of touching it up over the last half hour so if you like it enough shoot me a comment and I'll make another chapter, maybe get back into writing longer fics. 
> 
> Enjoy!

Dan starts believing in God. He didn’t _mean_ to, really. It’s not like he woke up one morning and suddenly went, “You know what? God is real. I’ve had a revelation, I totally believe all of it!” and went from there. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been religious before, either. It just sort of _happened._ His parents had always been religious, tried to get him into it, but never pressured him. It was just one of those _things_ , like maths, where he’d be forced to think about it every once in a while. But it wasn’t really that big of a deal.

It was just now with a lot of time to think, he started to rationalize. He came to an ultimatum. If God and Heaven and Hell weren’t real, there was essentially no point. There was nothing for him to keep going for, nothing for him to hold on to. So he cast aside his previous inhibitions or doubts and decided that, for all intents and purposes, Dan Howell believed in God.

**I suppose as a narrator, it is my civic duty to explain to you what exactly is going on. I can’t imagine that last paragraph there made much sense. After all, you must be wondering why Dan suddenly has so much time to think. Or why his parents _used_ to be religious. Or why Dan needed something to hold on to or a reason to keep going. The simple explanation:**

The world was fucked. Completely, utterly, fucked. And Dan Howell along with it.

They called it RCNF. Nice and catchy, right? Four little letters to completely wreck the entire world. They packed quite a punch, as it turned out, for something so seemingly innocuous. It stood for Random Central Nerve Failure, and also the end of everything normal. It was a questionably contagious virus that attached to the brain stem and essentially ate through the tissue there. The only symptoms, insofar as they could tell: a headache, tiredness, and not waking up one morning until someone found you with dried blood running from your nose.

Of course, with half the population of everyone ever under immense stress by virtue of being a human being, headaches and tiredness were common. It was impossible to tell. Everyone from hypochondriacs to high school students were suddenly convinced they had RNCF (most just called it R or the R Virus). It was mass hysteria. Hospitals were overflowing, not that they did any good. R was basically undetectable until someone was dead. This only helped the panic along, as people weren’t content to just wait around for their loved ones to start dropping like flies.

They didn’t have to wait long. Within two months of the virus having a name and a few random outbreaks, millions were dead. It was unpredictable, untraceable, unprecedented. One might find themselves with a headache from that screaming baby on the bus, and the next day someone else would find them dead.

Mass hysteria and death doesn’t bode well for the functionality of society as a whole. Another two months into the introduction of R-Virus, and everything was ground to a screeching halt. There just wasn’t anybody left, as it appeared. And nobody knew why, or how to stop it, or who to look to. The entire planet was left isolated, right alongside millions of others.

Dan Howell comes in the same way millions of other no doubt did; he didn’t get R. He was 18, about to start at Uni in the fall, when they first announced something was amiss. By the time the virus had a name, Dan had already seen it up close. Not that there had been much to see, but still.

Dan had been the one to find the body. His mother. She had always been tired, had always gotten headaches. It was a normal part of life for Dan to come home and hear that he had to be quiet, that his mother was upstairs with a headache. Nobody could have ever suspected. There was nothing to suspect.  Not until one morning he went to bring her water, and as he opened the door, saw nothing but the beginning of the end.

She was pale, but she had always been pale. Not like this, though. Her skin was like paper. And her eyes, God, her eyes, it wasn’t something Dan could ever forget. Not like all the books, where they tell you it looked as if there was nobody there anymore, that there wasn’t a light behind her eyes anymore. It was more like there never had been anyone, there had never been a light. The virus may have taken her away, but not before it hollowed her out, gotten rid of anything there had been to take.

Dan doesn’t remember much else about that day, to be honest. He remembers her eyes, and he remembers staring at that shattered pitcher from when he’d dropped the water to go run for his father. He remembers thinking that if this were some tumblr poem or a poorly written story, he might reminisce about how the shattered glass represented the way his life was so shattered right then. What he was really thinking was just, “…”

He and his father, they buried her in the backyard. They put a makeshift stick cross to mark it, and a pile of stones at the head. Dan wrote on one in sharpie, _“someone who should never be forgotten. I love you.”_ There wasn’t much else to be done.

Next went his brother, silently in his sleep. Just like the rest of them. That was what made the virus so terrifying; there was nothing at all to see or to detect, nothing. It was completely silent. Apocalypse stories always held something dramatic and explosive, humanity’s last hurrah. Blood pouring from the eyes or open sores or vomiting blood or anything equally gruesome. Just something to show that humanity was still fighting against that which was so brutally ruining it. But there was nothing. It was always peering over your shoulder, waiting just beyond your doorstep, just beyond the shadows at night.

The pressure of waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen or not to happen was immense. It was insane. Dan could do absolutely nothing about it, no amount of thrashing or screaming would stop it. The universe royally did not give a fuck about Dan’s feelings or Dan’s brother. So RCNF took his brother, then it took his father a week later. Dan buried them both on his own. It took him a week, and at the end of it, Dan was left thinking, _“Fuck. This is it. I got lucky the first time, but this is it. I’m done, exposed twice in a bloody week. I suppose it’s been a good run and all that soppy shit, well, sort of. Won’t be missing this place, there’s nothing left to miss.”_

Once again, the universe royally fucked him over. On his 19th birthday, Dan Howell was alone. And still alive. Not that he wanted to be, but apparently he didn’t have much of a say in that anymore. Or any fucking clue. That was the worst part, in Dan’s opinion, being so utterly clueless and so goddamned afraid all the time. Isolation was pretty shitty, too. He spent about six weeks bouncing off walls in his house, his entire life a ticking bomb. He didn’t want to go outside, lest he be more exposed. Didn’t want to see anyone, lest he expose them. Didn’t want to stay inside, lest any lingering bacteria infect him. His head was all one endless droning pain, whether from panic or malnutrition or the placebo effect he couldn’t tell. And every night he’d stay awake, boundlessly terrified, convinced that if he never went to sleep he couldn’t not wake up the next morning.

And now, Dan is. Well. Not _well_ , but you get it. It’s been about a year since scientists first brought up RNCF, and Dan still has about no clue what he’s doing. Now he’s just more alone. Life is still shitty, but instead of worrying about things like the impending doom of a law degree he didn’t even want, he’s worrying about the impending doom of random death. The part that really bites for him, is that he’s gonna die _not knowing._ And that, it’s just unacceptable. Not that _anyone_ knows, if anyone is even around. About two months after R got really bad, everything sort of slowly crept to a stop. No telephone, no running water, no electricity, no wifi. Nothing. Dan is completely cut off in all imaginable ways.

He’s about halfway to nowhere in any direction, all alone in the middle of the end of the world. Or maybe it’s already the end of the end. How should he know? _He fucking doesn’t. It’s shitty._ He likes to reason to himself on good days, that humanity couldn’t possibly be all gone, not that quickly. Not with that little of a fight. There has to be _someone. Somewhere._ On his darker days, Dan imagines he’s alone. That there’s nothing left. That it’s all hopeless. Those days are not good days, and eventually he just has to grow the fuck up and go do something productive. That’s all there is at the end of the world.

He’s got plenty of supplies, having raided the neighbor’s houses for food before leaving. He just couldn’t stand the ghosts. Memories, any of it, all of it. It hurt. It took him about two weeks of randomly sitting around staring at walls and trying not to lose his damned mind, before he thought, _“right, fuck it, I am done. Fuck this place, I’m leaving.”_

So he left, and now he has even less of a damn clue what the hell he’s doing. He set off in the general direction of London, because civilization sounded pretty good. He likes to think that humanity likes to congregate, and where better than the already built urban center? Even so, it all seemed pretty damn hopeless. What was the bloody _point?_ He could be completely alone, even more so than he presently feels. There could be nobody at all, anywhere. And here he is, just wandering the woods like a ponce, hoping he might eventually stumble his way into something other than a snake pit. Do they even have snake pits in England? Dan isn’t sure, but hey, that’s not fucking new.

 Being alone has the added downside of giving Dan a lot of time to think, and everyone knows that doesn’t get him anywhere. There just isn’t enough to know to logically get anywhere. The disease is the first thing he thinks about, naturally. He can think he’s immune, which is honestly pretty likely. He was exposed three times in just a few months, and nothing happened. The other school of thought: he’s lucky. It’s possible, but given how shitty the rest of his luck has been, maybe not. He’s forced towards optimism on this one.

Sometimes he thinks about his family, usually on the bad days. The days when he has no idea why he’s even...anything. The days when he questions why he even bothers anymore. Why he bothers to keep trying, not when there’s exactly nothing left for him here. When it would be so, _so, so_ easy. When Dan runs out of reasons, he turns to his family.

Now, Dan used to think that the afterlife was kind of preposterous. After all, what point did real life have if you just got do-overs later? The easier—and more logical—assumption was that there was life, and that was it. You got your one shot, and if you fucked it up, that was it. If you were successful, that was a pretty good reward. But now, he’s started to think—the afterlife is the endgame, that’s the whole point. If afterlife wasn’t real, if Heaven didn’t exist, then right now, his family was just… _gone._ Dan refuses to accept that. His family is what keeps him going, what keeps him moving forward. The knowledge that his parents would want him to stay fighting, that’s the only reason Dan is still going. Because, oh, it would be so much easier, easier to just lie down and stop trying.

But his parents would be disappointed in that kind of talk, he was brave and strong and all that other shit. Apparently. They’d tell him as much if they were still there. But they weren’t, they were just watching him from the other side. If nothing else, Dan has that. So he decides that religion might have gotten at least some of it right. At least the parts about the afterlife, about everything having a purpose, and about there being a higher power. Because damn it, he needs somebody to blame for all this shit. And he needs something to hold on to, even if it’s only vague ideas about afterlife and his parents hugging him one more time.

The thing about it is, Dan is _tired._ He’s fucking tired of being alone, of jumping at shadows and waiting for the fearsome beasts of the English countryside to jump out and try to kill him while he sleeps. He’s exhausted of hearing rustling in a bush somewhere off to his left, and thinking _food_ before he thinks _person._ The unending, terrible itch between his shoulder blades that screams _someone might be watching you, someone is looking for you_ weighs on him more than his pack does, even as it gets heavier with each passing day.

Dan isn’t built for survival, or for living in the wilderness, or for being alone. He’s getting weaker. This knowledge, terrible as it may be, is _utterly fucking useless._ He sees it in the sag of his jeans, now shredded and mud-caked on a good day. He sees it in the protrusion of his collarbones under the threadbare shirt that does fuck-all keeping him warm. The way his ankles ache after walking two miles and he has to stop before the stabs of agony send him crashing to the ground.

Dan knows he isn’t going to last much longer, not like this. Not on his own. He begins to wonder if it might be better, dying this way. At least then he’d _know._

He thinks of these things as he walks each day. He shoulders his pack and trips his way down abandoned highways with burned-out shells where cars used to be, and follows the signs where possible. Not all of them are intelligible, but the ones that are, are slowly but surely guiding him south. South, towards London. Dan prays to every deity, every plausible god, especially the one he’s only just started believing in, that Humanity is putting up a fight. That they would take more than a year to just…evaporate, leaving only twisted metal and bones in their wake. He figures the bigger the city, the more possible survivors.

So he heads to London.

He heads to London, not really expecting much of anything. Pessimistic by nature and now sure of his own death, Dan does not anticipate much of anything from this.

Which is why he really, really doesn’t see it coming when he crashes through some underbrush at the side of a highway, so intent on falling to sleep right that instant that he isn’t aware of his own surroundings, and looks up to see a person.

A real, honest-to-god human, the first one Dan’s seen in probably an eternity. He’s so _unused_ to it all that he doesn’t even think. His body just goes on autopilot, dumps all his stuff and takes of running, panic making everything a little blurry around the edges. He ignores the man’s shouts behind him, ignores the sharpness in his chest or the metallic taste creeping up the back of his throat. Every instinct he has left is screaming at him, screaming _away, safety, flee._

It doesn’t take long for him to realize it’s futile. He’s not getting anywhere, not with the world spinning on its axes like this, sending shockwaves through the ground and flinging him every which way. Not with blackness creeping around the edges of his vision, or his legs in absolute _agony,_ each footfall sending fire sparking up to his spine.

His legs give out from under him, rather suddenly. He lies on his side, wheezing and probably dying, mouth full of dirt and blood seeping up the back of his throat. All that work turns out to be for nothing, too, when the crunching of footsteps sounds behind him. Jerkily, he tries to stand, but makes it as far as hands and knees before crashing back into the dirt, facefirst this time. His last thought before he blacks out is _I guess I was weaker than I thought._  

 


End file.
